I'm Lye, an illustrator, tattoo designer, and comic artist based in Charlotte, NC.

I love botany, and the visual and practiced languages of taxonomy, herbal medicine, and the occult. Colorful shapes and a nest of plants envelop their hosts, protecting them. Transparent organs reveal their fragile contents. Things exist in both states of alive and dead simultaneously, proving an ability to fall and recover and grow.

I found that I was incredibly interested in mapping the paths you can take through the endless web of Wikipedia links, so I started drawing a Wendigo and opened up the corresponding Wiki page. From there, I would periodically click on an interesting link and incorporate it into the drawing. From start to finish there are more than 40 embedded articles.

2011 | illustration

Wendigo Devours Wikipedia

watercolor, ink on polypropylene

22" × 30"

While researching a topic for a sociology essay, I got sucked into Wikipedia link after link until I ended up on a page for a Wendigo, an Algonquian mythical creature that would possess people and turn them into cannibals. I had no idea how I got to this page.

I found that I was incredibly interested in mapping the paths you can take through the endless web of Wikipedia links, so I started drawing a Wendigo and opened up the corresponding Wiki page. From there, I would periodically click on an interesting link and incorporate it into the drawing. From start to finish there are more than 40 embedded articles.